You sit in your familiar office or apartment. Outside the window the world is dull grey. Inside there is an itch. A nasty, aching emptiness, as if a raw wound were lodged inside you. It demands attention. It yells: “Something’s wrong! Do something, now!”

That’s when he shows up. Our inner Foreman. The specialist who erects invisible fortresses, chief architect of worlds that don’t exist. A handyman of illusions. He grabs the first “if only” within reach - “if only I were thin/rich/smart/beautiful…” - snatches pieces from the past or the future, and starts building.

Brick by brick. Floor by floor. A castle in the air that feels solid from the inside. This isn’t dreaming, it’s escape. A grand, majestic exit that dives into the depths of consciousness where you are the architect of a hand-crafted paradise.

Every floor in that castle is still you, just better. There you don’t hesitate, don’t fold, don’t fall through cracks. There you’re the protagonist who never forgets a detail, never runs late, and always knows what to do and what to say.

The brain presses a bandage over its throbbing reality. And marvel of marvels - the pain dulls, the emptiness fills up. For a while you disappear into this bright, invented world. You stand on the summit, wrapped in the arms of the perfect partner, fists full of cash. It’s an anesthetic injected straight into your neural folds. For a moment the pain is gone, and relief arrives.

The sting of seeing your own problems quiets down. You drift in that intoxicating haze, certain that any minute now you’ll step off the gangway of an imaginary plane into a fresh, flawless life. Every problem plastered over, every doubt silenced. The bandage sticks.

But the homemade narcotic wears off, and you crash with a deafening thud. From the heights of your imagined citadel straight back to where you started. Only now the bitterness is thicker. And once again you sit amid the rubble.

We keep building castles that collapse under their own weight, and every time the same pain greets us. What we truly need is action, yet we’re scared: real life is a minefield. One wrong step - boom. Consequences, responsibility, the risk of failure. Or, scarier still, the risk of success that will demand even more of us. Beyond the swamp we know, everything is uncharted.

So we choose the familiar ache of self-deception. We prefer to mourn inside a cozy world of illusions rather than gamble and step outside. After all, there might be dragons beyond the bog.

Which means our dreams aren’t a compass. They’re a numbing bandage. They mute the hurt of not living the life we wanted. But the effect fades, the wound throbs louder, and we reach for another strip - brighter, stronger. Round and round we go.

And until we admit that this loop is self-inflicted torment, until we rip off that bandage, look at the wound without flinching, and start acting - not in our head, but in the world - we’ll keep racing in circles. From illusion to bitterness and back to a new illusion. Because the bandage never heals. Action does. That truth is bitter, and it’s also the way out.